My dad spent his life in lights. His name wasn’t in them, but he spent his career working with them. A lighting engineer, he knew all about illumination – and he was pretty good at using light to do more than just show you the way around a dark room. He was one of the early pioneers of son et lumière, using sound and light to retell stories, and he worked across theatre lighting’s great transition, from an analogue tradition with its roots in the old limelight to the digital technology behind today’s programmable extravaganzas. But my brother and I share a simpler memory – him telling us, as wide-eyed kids, about his exploits on Lowestoft pier and sea front, setting up the summertime illuminations. Warning: don’t try this at home! His job, as a 14-year-old apprentice, was to test whether the light sockets were live. By licking his fingers – and sticking them in! Obviously a formative experience, since I’ve also spent my life in illumination – only my interest is in the ideas which light up the world. Innovation. And you don’t have to look far to see its symbol. It’s everywhere, still, in our language – the lightbulb moment, the flash of inspiration. The bulb has become the universal shorthand for a bright idea, one which persists even though the incandescent bulb itself has been consigned to history, replaced by the ubiquitous LED. And who gave us that lightbulb, as a practical device as well as a wonderful metaphor? His god-fatherly face beams out at us from thousands of photos. If we want to get really authentic we can watch him in early film clips or hear him in scratchy early recordings – all made possible by his seemingly unending stream of inventive ideas. Thomas Alva Edison. ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park’, holder of 1,093 US patents, whose electric companies were the foundation for General Electric, and midwife to so much of the technology of power, sound and light which we take for granted today. Born to the breed? He was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, and his formal schooling lasted barely a few months. The story goes that a teacher called him ‘addled’; his furious mother took him out and taught him at home. He read voraciously but was also an active experimenter, building a small telegraph line with a neighbour’s boy and turning the family cellar into a chemistry lab. At 12 he started work on the Grand Trunk Railway between Port Huron and Detroit as a ‘news butcher’, selling newspapers and snacks to passengers. Not content with the main job, he set up some side hustles, employing other boys to run stands in Port Huron selling vegetables and candy. At his peak he claimed profits of around $50 a week (close to $2,000 today), most of which went on equipment for electrical and chemical experiments. By 15 he was publishing his own newspaper, the Grand Trunk Herald, printed in the baggage car – which also housed his travelling laboratory, until a stick of phosphorus set the car alight and an angry conductor threw him, and his chemicals, off the train. His way into telegraphy came through an act of courage. In 1862 he snatched three-year-old Jimmie MacKenzie from the path of a runaway freight car at Mount Clemens station. The boy’s grateful father, the station agent, repaid him by teaching him telegraphy. Edison became an itinerant operator, drifting from town to town – and already inventing. Working nights at Stratford Junction in Ontario, he had to signal every hour to prove he was awake, so he rigged a clockwork device to send the signal automatically while he dozed. It worked perfectly – until a puzzled dispatcher tried to reply. His first patent, in 1869, was for an electric vote recorder for legislatures. It worked beautifully; unfortunately nobody wanted it. Politicians liked the slow roll call, which gave them time to horse-trade. It was a lesson he never forgot, and we’ll come back to it. That same year he arrived in New York almost penniless and talked his way into sleeping at the Laws Gold Indicator Company. When the system relaying gold prices to brokers broke down amid chaos on the trading floor, Edison was the one who fixed it – and was hired on the spot. Within months he had set up as an electrical engineer with a fellow telegrapher, Franklin Pope, who let Edison live in his New Jersey home. Right field, right time: growing interest in the practical applications of electricity meant investors were keen. His big break came in 1870, when the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company wanted to buy his improved stock ticker. He’d hoped for $5,000 but didn’t dare name a price. When they offered $40,000 – around a million dollars today – he later admitted he nearly fainted. With the money he opened workshops in Newark, where he was joined by Charles Batchelor, an English machinist who would become his right-hand man for decades. Together they perfected the quadruplex telegraph in 1874, sending four messages at once over a single wire – a huge saving for the telegraph companies and a handsome payday for Edison. That enabled the next step: the ‘invention factory’. The invention factory The name says it all – it was his attempt to industrialise innovation, making it something repeatable and manageable. With Batchelor he drew up a list of target inventions ranging far beyond telegraphy, and in 1876 they moved to a greenfield (literally) site at Menlo Park, New Jersey. The two-storey laboratory had heavy machinery downstairs and, upstairs, what Edison called ‘every kind of apparatus for scientific research’. From this base came a steady stream of inventions, largely delivering on his famous promise of ‘a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so’. It began small – Edison, Batchelor, the Swiss clockmaker John Kruesi, James Adams and a handful of machinists – funded largely by Western Union in return for early access to anything relevant to its business. That deal paid off handsomely. Edison’s carbon-button transmitter made Bell’s new telephone clear enough to be practical. Then, in 1877, came the phonograph. Edison sketched it, Kruesi built it for $18, and a sceptical colleague bet a box of cigars it wouldn’t work. Edison bellowed ‘Mary had a little lamb’ into the mouthpiece, turned the handle – and the machine spoke back. ‘I was never so taken aback in my life,’ he said. Within months the press had crowned him the Wizard of Menlo Park. Just as in Silicon Valley today, adventurous investors piled in; J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts backed the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878. That fuel let Menlo Park grow to around 60 staff exploring the wider problems of scaling his technologies. He didn’t invent the lightbulb – people had been working on it for decades – but he brought his R&D resources to bear on creating an entire system to deliver electric light reliably and at scale. In the process he changed how we think about innovation systems. His early career was hands-on, inventions sparked from insight, energy and the ability to work with others. But as things grew he had to find a way of replicating that. Increasingly he took a leadership role – setting direction, sharing a vision and creating an enabling environment. One which recognised and rewarded people, gave them considerable autonomy and fostered a creative climate that was playful and fun, while drawing long days and late nights of effort from his teams. Work often ran through the night, broken by a midnight ‘lunch’ of pie and coffee, with someone playing the pipe organ that stood at the end of the lab and the team singing along. So a genius – yes. But his lessons have less to do with particular intellectual or technical skills and a whole lot more to do with how innovation happens. He understood it, lived it – and left us a legacy for how we organise and manage the process so that we can repeat the trick. As we mark the 95th anniversary of his death on 18 October 1931, it’s worth reminding ourselves of some key lessons that are just as relevant today. 1. Innovation is not about the lone genius One reason we have so many images of Edison is that he was savvy about PR – never shy in front of the cameras, always ready for a photo opportunity. Those early years selling snacks on the train taught him that things don’t sell themselves! But while the images tell a story of the solo genius, Edison knew the reality was different. For him innovation was always a multi-player game, depending on collaboration, cross-fertilisation of ideas and complementary skills. He surrounded himself with people who could add to what he brought to the party, building networks which drew together the key elements he needed to create value – ideas and skills, money and influence. An innovation ecosystem, long before we coined the phrase. 2. Innovation is NOT a lightbulb moment Despite the myths, he understood better than anyone that innovation is not a sudden epiphany, a blinding flash. It’s a journey, long, slow and uncomfortable, through the land of uncertainty. It needs organising into a process. The invention factory wasn’t a fashion statement – it was a model for systematising what he’d learned about how innovation happens. His ‘minor invention every ten days’ promise wasn’t empty hype; he’d worked out how to deliver on it. Not by magic but by managing innovation – and he made that the DNA of his operation, ‘the way we do things round here’. 3. Innovation thrives on diversity When he’d made enough money to set up his invention factory, Edison assembled a team known as the ‘muckers’ to make the magic happen. This wasn’t just ‘many hands make light work’ – it was many minds. They were a motley crew, deliberately chosen for their differences. Machinists and mathematicians, glassblowers and gunsmiths, chemists and clockmakers. An English machinist (Batchelor), a Swiss clockmaker (Kruesi), a German
